A
field of flax in flower made a bonny crop,a lake of blue
flowers lapping against the woods and hedgerows.
A useful crop, indeed, for the seeds produced linseed oil, while
the straw was “retted,” then processed in some local
mill, then sent as tow to the “hecklers,” spinners,
weavers, lappers and seamstresses of the factories.

It was useful,
too, in this respect, that it brought folk together, both young
and old. Even a youngster could help to spread the lint, and
an old woman could still sit filling the pirns, and no doubt
spin many an old tale besides.

The cultivation
of flax and making of linen is a very old craft. Blairgowrie
had one of the earliest scutching mills in Scotland, and until
recent times the fields along by the lochs of Marlee and Fingask
could still show a few acres of flax under cultivation.

The flower
of the flax not only created a staple industry, it wove itself
into our song and folklore. Even in the 14th century we have
Robert Henryson, a Dunfermline schoolmaster, describing the
processing of flax in verse:

“The
lynt ryipit, the carll pullit the lyne,
Rippillit the bolles, and in beitis set,
It steipit in the borne, and dryit syne,
And with ane betill knokkit it, and bett,
Syne swingillit it weill, and hekellit in the flat,
His wyfe it span, and twynit it in to threid.”

In remote
days the spinner made use of the distaff and spindle. Robert
Burns, in his poem “Bessie and Her Spinning Wheel,”
writes:

I bought
my wife a stane o’ lint,
As guid as e’er did grow,
And a’ that she has made o’ that
Is a’e weary pund o’ tow.
The weary pund, the weary pund,
The weary pund o’ tow.
I think my wife will end her life
Before she spins her tow.”

In the old
days, a servant lass taking a job was not asked if she could
sew or clean or bake or brew.
She was asked, ” Can you spin ?“ For a wage she
would get perhaps £1 per year, along with a lippie of
lint-seed. This she sowed in a piece of ground in one of her
master’s fields, and the crop that resulted became her
property, later to be woven into sheets and towels for her “providing”
on marriage.

In one old
song, “Janet and Me,” the crofter boasts about his
possessions, and mentions:

But it was
a long way from the sown seed to the snowy linen of the dower
chest. There was hard work in the fields, weeding and more weeding.
When the plant had ripened there was the pulling, and laying
in lint-holes. There the lint was steeped till fermentation
set in, then soread out to dry.

When dry,
it was bundled and carried to the lint-mill. If you look at
an old map of Tayside, you will ‘see these lint-mills
dotted here and there along the valleys of the streams. The
Dighty, flowing past Dundee, was a very hard-worked stream in
this respect.

At the mill
the wood was removed from the fibre by means of fluting and
scutching. Then the heckler took over. His job was a very dusty
one. The heckle was a rough stand about three feet high with
a heavily spiked board set on top. Over these spikes the flax
was thrown, and combed to get rid of the tow, a heavy job as
well as a dusty one, and it needed a certain dexterity.

The flax
was then put into “heads,” passed on to the rock
and spindle, and transformed into yarn. Women took over the
job here, winding the spun flax on to large bobbins, from which
it was reeled into hanks. Then came boiling and cleaning. On
drying it was filled on to warp pirns and beamed, and so was
formed the foundation of the future web. Then the weaver came
into the picture, and the web was woven.

But it was
not all work and no play. There were many social interludes
like spinning-bees, at which the lasses demonstrated their skill,
to the accompaniment of song and story. Some of these songs
are quite charming in their words and melody. Some are comic,
such as “The Weaver o’ the North”

There was
a weaver o’ the north
And oh but he was cruel,
The very nicht that he got wed
He sat an’ grat for gruel.”

But alas,
the day of the blue fields of flax and of the lint-mills have
passed. As the great spinning-mills of Dundee, Arbroath and
so on came into being, the patches of lint around villages and
farms began to dwindle, for now huge supplies of flax were being
imported from the Baltic, dwarfing the local crops into insignificance.

So the housewife
stowed away her spindle and wheel, and the wobster set aside
the handloom that had served for several generations of his
family. Gone were the cheerful gatherings, when neighbours came
to beam the web, and all that fun and frolic on the village-green
at bleaching-time, it now belonged to the past.

But the
flax industry, one of the very earliest of human enterprises,
still thrives, though in a different way and in a different
setting.

And we can
still sing the weaving songs:

If it wisna
for the weavers, what would we do?
We wadna hae claith made o’ oor woo’,
We wadna hae a coat, neither black nor blue
Gin it wisny for the wark o’ the weavers.